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The Super Bowl highlights are up on the iTunes Store (which still has DRM) and this reminds me again that the producers of sports programming are missing a huge opportunity to cash in on the Long Tail Effect. Look, I could care less about Peyton Manning (the shameless shill!) and the Colts. I was rooting for the Chargers this year (my wife is from San Diego and we visit every summer). Still, I’m sure that there are dozens of Colts fans that will buy the highlight video from the iTunes Store to remember their team’s victory. Bears fans probably won’t be interested, except to watch the first 12 seconds a few times and dream about next year.

But I’d sure like to own highlight films of my hometown San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl victories under Joe Montana and Steve Young. Shoot, even a “Road to the Super Bowl” special featuring “The Catch” would be fun to own. Then I’d still like to get a video of UCSB winning this year’s College Cup (Go Gauchos!) and maybe some classic games too. Yeah, classic all-time sports matchups on the iTunes Store – are you feeling me now? Read more…

I religiously download all the freebies from the iTunes Store every Tuesday. Today, there are a few new items, including a free demo of Vortex, an iPod game (if you’ve got a 5G video iPod). This is the first time that I can recall seeing a free iPod game on the iTunes store. Personally, I think it’s great. The previews on the iTunes Store give you a small clip of the game in action, but I’d rather play a couple levels before I decide to plunk down $4.99.

Welll, I only scored 5/20 on my Macworld predictions. But then, I don’t think anybody anticipated that the entire keynote would be about AppleTV and the iPhone with no news about the Mac at all. What did I get right? Here’s a list…

I’m also going to take credit for a long-shot prediction that Apple would create a product to compete with Microsoft Home Server. The new Airport has a new Airport Disk feature that allows you to turn it into a NAS device simply by plugging in a USB drive. The lack of gigabit ethernet still bugs me though.

That leaves 15 predictions of things that I still expect to see from Apple. I hope we hear about them soon, because I’m about to buy a new Mac and I was waiting on MWSF to make up my mind. Now I’m in a holding pattern waiting for the inevitable hardware updates and a Leopard release date.